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Anybody know of any game that uses a first person view in an epic battle. For example, a Braveheart-like battle with the player wielding a battle axe and chopping throgh enemies while his friends fight along side him. Is this feasible in a game. Would the game become incredibly slow by the large number of characters involved or would there be a way to implement it. Has it been accomplished already?

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Well it's not first person but what you're talking about is done in games like Ninety-nine Knights. Massive battles with tonnes of enemies. It's third person but you'd still be dealing with all of the same technical issues. They manager to make it work.

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Guest Anonymous Poster

Check out Mount & Blade - very good implementation, but battle sizes are not that large

Also, Kingdoms under fire: the crusaders for the xbox. This game is third person perspective, but quite large battles and you are controlling an individual. Actually, while you are out of melee you issue commands to units, but when you move to contact you are fighting hand to hand. A very interesting game

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What sort of epic battles are you talking about. Several tens of men? hundreds? thousands? The more you want the harder it will be to do. It will probably be a while before a computer can simulate a huge battle with tens of thousands of troops each having individual AI and fighting in physics based combat. But in such a battle, no one sees the whole thing. Thus it may be easier to make the player feel like he's in a bigger battle than he's really in. Perhaps spawn more guys when he goes into an area of the battlefield that weren't really there fighting before but look like they were.

"Tolkien style battles in first person - that's the only way to describe it."I hope they can come up with a good control scheme for hand-to-hand combat, although that's tough to do with just a mouse and keyboard. It looks like it could be a great game though; I just watched the video on their site. Awesome graphics stuff. Of course, we have yet to see gameplay.

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A thread about large battles an dnobody mentioned Dynasty Warriors? Go rent Dynasty Warriors 5. It is sweet, although they took out the option to hear the voices in Japanese, which makes everything sound more badass. Too bad they don't have Chinese.

The fact of the matter is that games with "huge battles" involving "thousands of characters" generally feature the hero character wading through hordes of pawns, scoring multikills and powering up his superweapon. Star Fox 64, Zone of the Enders 2 and Various WWII games have had levels with a similar structure, but the player character is always the guy that gets fifty or sixty kills single-handedly.

I like these games and sequences, but don't confuse large action sequences with "Being a soldier in a huge battle". It's more like "Being an unstoppable juggernaut on a field full of incompetent boobs".

It's no fun to be a grunt in a big fight. It's like sucking at Unreal Tournament. If you can't get a kill or two before you catch a random missile in your teeth, then you just get angry. That's why Rainbow Six's multiplayer was so unpopular.

You're thinking of Braveheart, with Mel striking down footmen left and right. In a multiplayer game, some poor noob will swear every time he swings his sword, because they'll be dying. The chat log would be a constant scroll of "TEH HAX" or "LAAAAGGGGGG". What's more, it only takes one arrow to kill him, so it'll come out like Soldat, where I dive across the bridge, machinegun two defenders, nade the foxholes, knife the camping newb who thinks he's defending the flag, grab the banner, turn to run, and catch a .50 bullet in the left eye. Dang. It's noteworthy, and I'll brag about it on the forums, but I hardly feel like Rambo.

So I recommend a lot of weenie NPC enemies and third-person controls.

Somethine you'll see in Dynasty Warriors, especially in multiplayer, is that the groups of enemies are culled in real-time, so if you're in a mass of thirty enemy soldiers, it'll only actually render fifteen or twenty of them. This can suck, but it's forgivable. And it reduces the need to synch all the bots in multiplayer. If I see another human "hero" chopping madly at the air, and periodically a corpse flies from the end of his spear, then I just figure he's whacking at some bots that I'm not seeing. After a while, it barely hurts immersion.